Congratulations to Theodore Fawcett and Daniel Whittle on passing their DPhil vivas
The RAI congratulates two of its Postgraduate Members, Theodore Fawcett and Daniel Whittle, on passing their doctoral vivas.
Theo Fawcett’s DPhil dissertation, “Crisis of Compromise,” reimagines the defining political issues of the United States between 1840 and 1860 - territorial expansion, immigration, sectional nationalisms, party mobilisation, and attitudes toward political compromise and violence – in generational terms. Treating generations as both an analytical category and a lived reality, it examines how generations shaped United State politics and political culture both int terms of competing generational identities, through inter-generational politics, and through competing conceptions of inter-generational responsibility. In doing so, it establishes a novel analytical framework for examining party mobilisation, intra-party conflict and factionalism, Northern and Southern sectionalism, and transfers of power between political generations. Theo’s examiners, Dr Stephen Tuffnell and Professor Liz Varon (University of Virginia and a former Harmsworth Professor) praised a “deeply researched, insightful, well-crafted dissertation” and passed it with no corrections. Theo was an active Postgraduate Member of the RAI, an engaged participant in seminars and an ever-cheerful presence in our kitchen and common room. His supervisor, Professor Adam Smith, commented “Theo Fawcett is one of the most talented historians of politics I have supervised in my career. His meticulous research, which included sophisticated quantitative as well as quantitative analysis, was matched by a deep appreciation of the sensibilities of the people of the past whose lives he was studying.”
Daniel’s pioneering doctoral thesis, conducted in the Classics Faculty under the joint supervision of Dr Justine McConnell (KCL) and Professor Fiona Macintosh, boldly expands the field of classical reception studies. Building on earlier research into Classics in the Caribbean since 1900 and into Black classicisms more broadly, Daniel’s thesis examines a number of under-explored narratives of enslavement from the long nineteenth century that engage subversively with Greco-Roman material. Written in English, French and Spanish, within the United States and across the Caribbean, these narratives, it is argued, deploy Greco-Roman tropes to deconstruct the colonial apparatus of racialised slavery and to delineate visions of liberation. The thesis was successfully examined in December 2025 by Professor Patrice Rankine (Chicago) and Constanze Guethenke (Oxford).
